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EC approves Oracle-Sun
The European Commission cleared Oracle’s proposed acquisition of Sun
Microsystems. While Larry Ellison is set to unveil Oracle’s
Sun strategy on January 27th, Monty Widenius said he will go to the
Court of First Instance to appeal the decision.

A recent pitch from the folks opposing Oracle’s ownership of
MySQL via acquisition of Sun Microsystems got me thinking. The
plea, ‘Oracle can have Sun, but not MySQL’ may make sense to
some, but to me it speaks to the irony of closing out Oracle or any company or anyone
from open source. Upon further reflection and given 2010 is off
to a roaring pace of M&A, I also began to
wonder what the impact of the ‘Save MySQL’ campaign could be on
open source in M&A, particularly if it was to successfully
derail the acquisition or somehow decouple MySQL from Sun under
Oracle?

What would it mean to carve out the open source projects,
components, teams and support from companies involved in mergers
and acquisitions over …

Since the European Commission announced it was opening an
in-depth investigation into the proposed takeover of Sun
Microsystems by Oracle with a focus on MySQL there has been no
shortage of opinion written about Oracle’s impending ownership of
MySQL and its impact on MySQL users and commercial partners, as
well as MySQL’s business model, dual licensing and the GPL.

In order to try and bring some order to the conversation, we have
brought together some of the most referenced blog posts and news
stories in chronological order.

Part one took us from the announcement of the
EC’s in-depth investigation up to the eve of the communication of
the EC’s Statement of Objections.

Oracle’s proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems looks set for
approval by the European Commission after the competition
commission welcomed commitments from Oracle related to the future
development and licensing of the open source MySQL database.

The EC has until January 27, 2010, to reach a final decision
however it appears that significant progress has been made
following hearings in Brussels last week where Oracle made its
case for approving the acquisition and opponents including SAP,
Microsoft and Monty Program AB argued against the proposed
acquisition.

Oracle has published a list of ten commitments that it is
prepared to make to assuage the EC’s concerns over the future of
MySQL, which were quickly and enthusiastically welcomed by the
European Commission.

I got a call from Monty today, and he told me that its crunch-time:
the European Commission is about to come up with a decision on
the status of Oracle’s purchase of Sun Microsystems. The part
that interested me verbally, and he wrote (you should read: Monty says: Help saving MySQL), was this:

Instead of just working out this with the EC and agree on
appropriate remedies to correct the situation, Oracle has instead
contacted hundreds of their big customers and
asked them to write to the EC and require unconditional
acceptance of the deal.

I’ve been trying to dig a bit deeper into the European
Commission’s investigation of Oracle’s proposed acquisition of
Sun Microsystems, to look beyond the received wisdom about the
EC’s concerns about the deal.

We know they revolve around the open source MySQL database, the
European Commission has said that much. But the Statement of
Objections weighs in at 155 pages, and even those that have read
it admit to being confused by it. Meanwhile some of the most
vocal parties in the public debate have vested interests in
encouraging opinions for or against the deal.

Without knowing precisely what the European Commission wants to
achieve it is impossible to come to any conclusions about the
investigation. However, here are a few statements and
observations:

Since the European Commission announced it was opening an
in-depth investigation into the proposed takeover of Sun
Microsystems by Oracle with a focus on MySQL there has been no
shortage of opinion written about Oracle’s impending ownership of
MySQL and its impact on MySQL users and commercial partners, as
well as MySQL’s business model, dual licensing and the GPL.

In order to try and bring some order to the conversation, we have
brought together some of the most referenced blog posts and news
stories in chronological order.

Part one took us from the announcement of the
EC’s in-depth investigation up to the eve of the communication of
the EC’s Statement of Objections.

Part two, below, takes us from there to the eve of the
announcement of Oracle’s concessions. …

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